obstetrimetrics
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Explanation
The Joke
In the first panel, a mathematician complains to a colleague that he is tired of being a pure mathematician. He says they just sit around solving endless pointless puzzles, and he wants to help people "right now." He declares he is going to go be a doctor who delivers babies.
In the second panel, labeled "Later," the mathematician is now working as an obstetrician. A nurse tells him that he will have an "integral quantity of babies" and to find himself a new doctor. Meanwhile, the mathematician is telling a patient he needs to know the "specific number" of babies by determining the area under the "space-time curve of her pregnancy." He has brought calculus into the delivery room.
The Humor
The joke plays on the word "delivers" and the mathematician's inability to stop thinking in mathematical terms even when he switches careers. The title "Obstetrimetrics" is itself a portmanteau of "obstetrics" (the medical field dealing with childbirth) and "metrics" (measurement). The mathematician wanted to escape pointless abstract puzzles, but he has immediately turned the practical task of delivering babies into another abstract math problem -- talking about integrals and space-time curves instead of just counting babies. The nurse's reaction (telling the patient to find a new doctor) shows that his mathematical approach is entirely unhelpful in a real medical context.
References
The comic references integral calculus, where finding the area under a curve (integration) is a fundamental operation. The humor lies in applying this abstract mathematical concept to something as concrete and practical as counting how many babies a pregnant woman is carrying, which in reality is simply determined by an ultrasound.